Tony Orrico utilizes patterned physical movement and graphite mark-making on paper to create bilateral drawings that leave a powerful record of his process. He is equal parts dancer, choreographer and visual artist; and there is a hypnotic quality to the repetitive motions, intense focus, and physical endurance required to create his drawing performances that can last up to seven hours.

He shared his artistic journey with the PopTech 2011 audience, including the important early influence of his grandfather, a painter, as he began his exploration of visual art and contour through dance and choreography that have culminated in his Penwald drawing series. The video shows Tony performing one of those pieces at PopTech 2011. Read more...

Michael Murphy, Founding Partner and Executive Director of MASS Design Group is an architect who explores questions with an anthropologist’s sensitivity to cultural context. A 2011 Social Innovation Fellow, he was just awarded designer of the year by Contract magazine.

His PopTech 2011 talk examines design solutions to a set of questions including: If we require a building to give jobs only to the community in which it’s built, how many people would be impacted? What economies would be created if only local materials were used for building and construction? How would buildings look if they responded specifically to the climate and landscape in that region? We caught up with him to find out about his plans and new projects.

PopTech: What have you been working on recently?
Michael Murphy: We've been hired by USAID to draft a primer for international health facilities. All health infrastructures that they fund or build will be informed by this primer policy document. Besides what happens with an individual building, we could change policy globally, which would be really substantial for us.

We broke ground on Phase Two of the Butaro Hospital in Rwanda. We'll be building around 20 or so houses for staff, doctors, visiting surgeons and surgical residents who will be coming from Brigham and Women's hospital. We want to build dignified residences to help keep doctors on staff. That should be completed by this June.

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Bernard Lietaer has been studying the implementation of monetary systems for over thirty years. Trained as a civil engineer and economist, he has worked as a central banker, fund manager, university professor and consultant to governments, corporations and communities. He travels the globe researching and speaking about currency systems and is the author of numerous books and articles. 

In his 2011 PopTech presentation, he argues against a monoculture of currency – fiat currency, that is, such as the dollar, euro, or yuan –  in favor of a high diversity of currencies such as the WIR, Dora, and other local currencies, which he believes, are shown to provide high resilience to communities and nations.

He posits that it’s been scientifically proven that we need more than one currency, noting that patriarchal cultures have always had monopolies of a central currency, and matrifocal societies have always had a multiplicity of currencies. He believes we can rebalance our current monetary system woes through a rebalancing of the masculine and feminine in the money domain and that “political democracy without monetary democracy just doesn’t work”.

His most recent book, New Money For A New World, co-authored with Stephen Belgin was published late last fall. It further examines the role of complimentary currencies in creating and maintaining a resilient economy.

2011 Social Innovation Fellow Jake Porway wants to live in a world where every social impact organization thinks deeply about their data. As a result, Porway founded Data Without Borders to explore how data scientists can help solve social, environmental, and community problems alongside nonprofits and NGOs. His inspiration for founding the organization came after attending a hackathon where he thought, "Instead of just figuring out how to build another restaurant review app., can't we figure out how to help feed people?"

To test that hypothesis, Data Without Borders held two weekend-long data dives during 2011. Their first event in New York last fall brought sixty data scientists together with NYCLU, UN Global Pulse and Mix Market. They dove into those organizations' existing data sets to understand what questions the data could answer, and how to best frame those questions, understand the variables, and account for the missing values. Out of the sessions, one group said they "saved a year’s worth of work," and another group formed an ongoing collaboration with the UN Global Pulse project in which their work was shown in a presentation to the UN General Assembly. You can read about the exciting results from both data dives in more detail.

Based on the success of the data dives, Data Without Borders is planning to launch DWB DataCorps early this year to build a vast network of data scientists that can work internationally, have sustained engagements, and bring lasting change to organizations that don't have data resources. The program will recruit volunteer fellows who can work on projects part-time over the weekends, nights or on their own schedules. If you're interested in helping, you can sign up on Data Without Border's volunteer page. 

Recently, we checked in with Porway to learn how his experience at PopTech shaped his current work with Data Without Borders.

PopTech: As a Social Innovation Fellow, what was your biggest takeaway from last year's PopTech conference?
Jake Porway: I walked away completely inspired by the realization that collaborations can't just happen between two organizations anymore. It has to be this multi-faceted collaboration between different groups with different skills. I have to admit, I naively walked into Data Without Borders thinking, “We've got this. We'll take the social sector, bring data scientists to it, we'll solve their data problems.” Almost immediately in working with these groups we found this data insight led to needing a tool. We realized that we need developers, designers, policy makers, and government.

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